Read the User Guide

Table of Contents

Overview 3 The Recording Chain 4 Articulations 6

Installation Guide 8 MPC X & MPC Live (Standalone Mode) 8 MPC Software Expansion 10 Drum Kit Conﬁguration 12 Presets 14 Legacy MPC Installation 15 Maschine Installation 15 Creating Custom Kits 16

2 Overview

'The Raw 70s Kit' from Pad Pimps is a multisampled vintage 70s drum kit recorded over multiple dynamic velocities direct to 2” analogue tape, giving you a powerful, gritty and incredibly versatile drum kit to create your own realistic drum performances full of vintage character.

The Kit

For this collection we chose the legendary 70's Ludwig classic kit (kick and toms) combined with hard hitting Ludwig 400 snare drum.

3 The kit also features 15" 5 star Super Zyn hi hats, a 19" Dream Bliss crash, 22" Zildjian K Constantinople medium thin low ride, and percussion in the form of cabasa, tambourine, cowbell.

Finally we’ve also included a ‘pandero snare’, which features a pandero tambourine skin-to-skin with the Ludwig snare, giving a uniquely different sound as an optional compliment the standard snare. The Recording Chain

The recording chain used was the same one used for ‘The 60s Funk Kit’. Recorded at Gizzard Studios in London UK, we used the following vintage mics: Coles 4038, Calrec 600, Sure 545 , Calrec CM 100,and a AKG 414.

Everything was then recorded into a Studer A80 2 inch sixteen track machine via an Alice Stancoil 1970's AM series quadrophonic mixer, giving everything that lovely warm, tape saturated sound, something that simply cannot be emulated by any VST plugin.

The resulting recordings were then transferred from tape as 24 bit WAVs via a MOTU Audio 24 I/O interface, and painstakingly edited down to create the individual multisamples. At no point did we add any EQ, compression or any other type of effects or processing. These sounds are raw and perfectly capture the natural warmth of a vintage recording session recorded to tape Articulations

The kit itself contains 7 unique instruments; kick, snare, hi hat, crash, ride, high tom and low tom, clap, tambourine and shaker. Additionally, some instruments are provided with a number of different articulations - for example the hi hat has three articulations; a closed hat hit across the main section of the cymbal (‘closed hat bow’), a closed hat hit on the edge of the cymbal (closed hat edge) and an open hat.

We recorded Richard playing each articulation over four dynamic levels (soft, medium soft, medium hard, hard) – this process was repeated several times for each articulation, giving us hundreds of samples for each articulation, from which

6 we selected the best samples. There are a total of 18 unique articulations provided:

1. Kick drum open – this was recorded with ‘open damping’ to provide a boomy, live sounding kick 2. Kick Drum Damped – this kick was recorded in isolation with lots of damping to produce a tight, hip hop style of live kick sound. 3. Snare –a snare drum hit in the centre of the head 4. Snare Rim - a hit on the snare rim using the fat end of the stick while resting the thin end on the head 5. Snare ‘drag’ – a short snare roll 6. Snare ‘pandero' – a snare with a pandero tambourine attached to its base 7. Closed Hat Bow – a closed hat hit at the centre 8. Closed Hat Edge – a closed hat hit on the very edge of the cymbal 9. Open Hat – the same hi hat hit while 3/4 open 10. Crash Cymbal Edge – hit on the edge of the cymbal 11. Ride Cymbal Bow – a ride hit at the centre of the cymbal 12. Ride Cymbal Bell – a hit to the bell of the cymbal 13. High Tom – centre hit on a high rack tom 14. Low Tom – centre hit on a low rack tom 15. Cowbell - live cowbell hit 16. Tambourine - single tambourine ‘slap’ 17. Shaker ‘up’ - shaker moved in an upward motion 18. Shaker ‘down’ - shaker moved in a downward motion

7 Installation Guide

The Raw 70s Kit is built using standard MPC ‘DRUM’ programs. The initial method of installation depends on the model of MPC you currently use. MPC X & MPC Live (Standalone Mode)

First download the zip ﬁle via the link provided after purchase and extract the contents to any location on your computer. Enter the the folder ‘MPC X-MPC Live Standalone’ and inside you’ll ﬁnd the folder ‘Raw 70s Kit’ – this is the folder we’re going to transfer to your MPC X/MPC live.

It’s not possible to copy ﬁles to the 16GB internal drive on your MPC so let’s assume you have a USB drive called ‘MPC DATA’ connected to the USB port on your MPC Live/X (you can also transfer to an SD card or internal SATA drive).

Connect your MPC X/MPC Live via USB to your computer and turn on your MPC. At this point, your USB disk will appear as a removable drive in your computer.

8 Now copy the ‘Raw 70s Kit’ folder to your MPC disk. To ensure that the kit is treated as a proper MPC Expansion (with the kit thumbnail image displayed in your Browser) make sure you ﬁrst create a folder called ‘Expansions’ in the root location of your MPC disk and copy the kit folder inside this ‘Expansions’ folder:

You can now ‘eject’ the disk from your computer and return your MPC Live/X to ‘Standalone’ mode.

You’ll ﬁnd the expansion contains a number of different presets to provide a variety of kit sounds. To preview and load kits, go to the BROWSER, select the ‘Expansions’ tab on the left side of the screen and tap on the Raw 70s Kit thumbnail. Your kits should now be displayed on the right of the screen - make sure the ‘programs’ ﬁlter is enabled:

If you have ‘AUDITION > AUTO’ enabled (bottom right of BROWSER screen) you can tap a program ﬁle to hear a preview of each kit before you load it. Double tap to load the kit into your project and assign it to a ‘DRUM’ type track in your current sequence in MAIN.

For the most up-to-date information on how to transfer sound packs to the MPC X and MPC live, please refer to this article: http://www.mpc-samples.com/article/ mpc-live-mpc-x-ﬁle-transfers MPC Software Expansion

The MPC Software expansion is for installation in MPC Software 2.0 and 1.9 and is suitable for use with any MPC Software controller such as the MPC Renaissance, MPC Studio, MPC Touch and MPC Live/X in ‘controller mode’.

10 Open the ‘MPC Software Expansion’ folder and locate the ‘Raw 70s Kit Expansion Installer.XPN’ ﬁle. With the MPC Software open in MAIN mode, drag & drop this ﬁle anywhere in the MPC interface and select ‘Import’.

Open the Expansion Browser (‘X’ on your keyboard for MPC Software 2.0, ‘shift and E’ for MPC Software 1.9), and click on the ‘Raw 70s Kit’ entry:

Expand the ‘Programs’ group to view all the provided presets. Single click an instrument to hear a program preview. Double click a kit(or drag and drop) to load it into your project. All kits are standard DRUM programs.

All programs are tagged under the ‘Acoustic’ and ‘Kits’ tags within the Media Browser in MPC Software 2.0 Drum Kit Configuration

The core layout for the MPC X/Live/Touch/Studio/Ren is as follows:

We have placed the main ‘bread and butter’ drum sounds on pads A5 to A8; kick (A5), snare (A6), closed hat (A7) and open hat (A8). Typically you would use your left hand to play the kick and snare, and your right hand to play the closed and open hats. You can use whichever ﬁngers feel the most natural.

We have placed the ‘edge’ hi hat on A3, just under the closed hat, this way it is easy to also incorporate some nice variation in your hat patterns. The edge and closed hat both automatically ‘mute’ the open hat.

For the snare we have provided a number of different articulations with a standard ‘centre’ hit on pad A5, a side stick on A02, a snare ‘drag’ (which is a very short snare roll) on A10 and the ‘pandero’ snare on pad A09. With a pandero snare we removed the mesh underneath the snare and replaced it with a pandero tambourine to give a uniquely layered snare sound.

13 We have also included two additional ‘shaker’ pads in BANK B on B01 (shaker up) and B02 (shaker down). These sound great played in an alternating fashion to mimic the up/down action of playing a real shaker. Presets

The MPC Expansion features a number of kit presets that offer pre-conﬁgured sounds and functionality.

The core kit is the ‘Classic’ Kit which uses Velocity Switching to play 4 different dynamic levels depending on the velocity you hit the pad. So if you hit the main snare pad very hard, it will play back a ‘hard’ snare sample. If you hit it very softly, it will play back a soft snare sample, and so on (remember to have FULL LEVEL turned OFF).

The ‘Cycle’ kit features ‘round robins’ where each pad is conﬁgured to play one of four ‘takes’ each time it is hit. This way you’ll always hear a slight and subtle change in timbre on each pad hit.

The ‘Finger Drum’ kit is based on the layout we used in the original ‘legacy MPC’ release of the Raw 70s Kit. This kit drops some articulations in favour of dedicated ‘ghost note’ pads for the main snare and kick on pads A09 and A01 respectively. It’s based on the cycle kit conﬁguration and due to the included ghost notes is perfect for use with FULL LEVEL ‘ON’. All sounds are in BANK A only. This is our recommended kit for live ﬁnger drumming use.

All other kit presets are based on the ‘Classic’ or ‘Cycle’ kit conﬁgurations, featuring different effects and program parameters to produce unique kit sounds in a particular style. Make sure ‘AUTO’ is selected in your MPC BROWSER so you can preview the sound of each kit before loading it.

14 Legacy MPC Installation If you own a legacy MPC, enter the folder ‘Legacy MPCs’ and locate the sub folder for your MPC model. From inside this folder, copy the ‘Raw 70s Kit’ folder to your usual MPC disk (e.g. CF card, USB drive, zip disk etc). For more information on transferring your sounds to your MPC, see our article here: http://www.mpc-samples.com/article/mpc-ﬁle-transfers

In your MPC, navigate to the Raw 70s Kit folder and load the correct program ﬁle made for your MPC:

• Raw 70s Kit.PGM - this is suitable for the MPC1000 and MP2500 running Akai OS, free JJOS or JJOS1. • Raw 70s-500.PGM - this is a 12 pad layout for the MPC500 • Raw 70s-JJXL.PGM - this is for JJOS ‘XL’, JJOS3, JJOS128XL and JJOS2 • Raw 70s Kit.50s - this is the standard ‘velocity switching’ kit for the MPC5000 • Raw 70s-Cycle.50s - this is the ‘cycle’ (round robin) kit for the MPC5000. • Raw 70s Kit.AKP - this is the standard ‘velocity switching’ kit for the MPC4000 • Raw 70s.pgm’ - 3 velocity kit for the MPC2000/XL/3000 • 70s Low.pgm - single velocity kit for the MPC2000/XL/3000

All legacy MPC kits are based on the ‘Finger Drumming’ layout template that uses the 16 pads of BANK A and utilises ghost snares and kicks on pad A09 and A01 respectively, making it perfect whether you prefer drumming with FULL LEVEL ‘on’ or ‘off’.

Maschine Installation

If you use Maschine 2, copy the ‘Maschine’ folder to your computer hard drive and In the Maschine Browser, navigate to the ‘Maschine’ folder and load the group ﬁle ‘Raw 70s Kit.mgrpx’. Alternatively you should be able to just double click the mgrpx ﬁle and it will automatically load into Maschine 2. This kit is compatible with Maschine 2.5 or greater.

15 Creating Custom Kits

Remember you can of course build your own custom kits from scratch using a new blank DRUM program. This way you can choose your own preferred layout, use only your favourite articulations and add other sounds to your kit (e.g. more percussion, bass, piano etc). For detailed guidance on how to build custom kits, check out MPC-Tutor’s large range of MPC Tutorial books: http://www.mpc-samples.com/section.php/8/0/akai-mpc-tutorials/

Drums performed by Richard Preston Engineered at Gizzard Studios, London Sample Editing & Programming by Andy Avgousti